VICTORIA — If there is any part of Canada that won’t forsake the environment in the face of international financial troubles, it’s B.C. Our economy remains strong, ironically thanks to boom times for coal and natural gas as well as urban prosperity.

But what’s a committed environmental voter to do? Governments elected in Ottawa next month and Victoria next year will set the stage for years to come, but so far the federal election has provided little more than crude scare scenarios and half-understood plans.

Conservative leader Stephen Harper first claimed the federal Liberal carbon tax plan would wreck the economy. Then he called it a threat to national unity, pulling taxes and spending control to Ottawa and away from Quebec.

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion’s communication problem grew worse when he admitted he doesn’t yet have a formula to keep B.C. residents from being double-taxed on carbon. That would have to be worked out with Premier Gordon Campbell after he gets elected.

A discussion with two prominent Victoria-area environmentalists running in the federal election quickly shows that what’s at stake goes far beyond a few dollars on heating and gasoline bills in B.C.

Liberal candidate Briony Penn and NDP incumbent Denise Savoie were endorsed last week by the Conservation Voters of B.C., an offshoot of mainstream environmental groups including the Sierra Club of B.C. and the Dogwood Initiative, a Victoria-based group that has focused on tanker traffic off the B.C. coast.

Dogwood executive director Will Horter notes that a natural gas rush in northeast B.C. may help feed the massive Alberta oil sands development. Proposals for oil sands pipelines to the West Coast are still around, as is doubling the volume of oil coming to the Vancouver port.

Penn, best known for her Lady Godiva impression in defence of a Saltspring Island forest, wants to put a stop to tankers, offshore drilling, LNG plants and open pen fish farms. She says both a carbon tax and a cap and trade system are needed to regulate fossil fuel emissions. “Unless we finance our conversion to an alternative technology, we are going nowhere.”

The NDP promises tougher medicine, a moratorium on all new oil sands development until Canada’s emissions are capped and a carbon trading system is in place.

“I’m not dissing the carbon tax,” Savoie says. “But I think our plan is better, because it isn’t revenue neutral, because we do need the money for this massive capital investment to shift this huge machine, the big levers of the economy in the direction we want to go.”

Conservation Voters says its focus on electability and mobilizing volunteers has produced a record of 15 out of 20 wins in federal and provincial elections. It hasn’t endorsed any Green candidates, despite the party’s apparent surge under Elizabeth May, former national director for Sierra Club. Mind you, May wants to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement, cut the work week to 35 hours and, for starters, put a carbon tax of 12 cents a litre on gasoline.

With three parties fighting over the environmental vote, Harper’s latest promise is to cut the federal tax on diesel from four cents to two.

The U.S. election will mean more to environmental issues in B.C. than the Canadian one. The recent anniversary of 9/11 reminds us of one key reason why oil sands and northern natural gas are priorities – energy security.

Aside from funding terrorist-sponsoring regimes, U.S. oil imports have contributed greatly to the country’s huge deficit.

They will use their Alaska oil and gas, and ours too. The task for Canada is to manage the results.

Tom Fletcher is legislative reporter and columnist for Black Press newspapers. tfletcher@blackpress.ca.